Biblatex and biber support.

[AdamGagorik]

I added biblatex and biber changes based on:

• https://code.google.com/p/latex-makefile/issues/detail?id=168&q=biblatex
• https://code.google.com/p/latex-makefile/issues/detail?id=142&q=biblatex
• https://code.google.com/p/latex-makefile/issues/detail?id=113&q=biblatex

I can't figure out how to run the tests. For my latex projects that are using biblatex and biber, it is working just fine.
Should probably test it to make sure it works still with plain bibtex.

Test

Ubuntu 14.10

Makefile.ini

neverclean      := *.pdf
onlysources.tex := main.tex
BUILD_STRATEGY  := pdflatex
use_biblatex    := 1

main.bib

@Article{Gagorik:2013:36,
  Title   = {{Monte Carlo} Simulations of Charge Transport in {2D} Organic Photovoltaics},
  Author  = {Gagorik, Adam G. and Mohin, Jacob W. and Kowalewski, Tomasz and Hutchison, Geoffrey R.},
  Journal = {J. Phys. Chem. Lett.},
  Year    = {2013},
  Number  = {1},
  Pages   = {36--42},
  Volume  = {4},
  Doi     = {10.1021/jz3016292},
  Eprint  = {http://dx.doi.org/10.1021/jz3016292},
  File    = {:./pdfs/Gagorik_2013_36.pdf:PDF},
}

main.tex

\documentclass{article}

\usepackage[%
    backend      = biber,
    style        = chem-acs,
    autocite     = superscript,
    articletitle = false
]{biblatex}
\addbibresource{./main.bib}
\let\cite\autocite

\begin{document}
%
    \section{Test}
        Here is a citation~\cite{Gagorik:2013:36}.
%
    \printbibliography
%
\end{document}

[shiblon]

Hey, thanks a lot for putting together a patch for this! I have a couple of comments (you can think of them as questions, too, really) that I'd like to discuss before merging this.

• If you can, it would be really helpful to comment the sed file that you wrote so that others can see what the intent is as they look at it later.
• The tests are actually fairly hard to run - they mostly just verify that your sed is doing what you expect. Basically I generate all of the golden files and then use git diff to see whether anything changed. It's pedestrian, but it lets me know if I messed something up with my sed scripts. Unfortunately there aren't good tests for the rest of the build process.
• If you could double-check that your indentation is the same as the surrounding context, that would be great. You may need to expose tabs to see how it is off (you can plainly see some of it in the diffs).
• I wonder if we could make this selection more automatic. Since the inclusion of biblatex triggers this, it seems like we could devise a way of detecting that without forcing the user to set a variable. If you look at how beamer is triggered, or how paper size is handled, you might get an idea of what I mean. Basically, I have some sed scripts that look through the document for either special comments or common includes, and use that to trigger different behavior. It makes for a nice user experience when it works. I would be interested in hearing your thoughts on that.

[AdamGagorik]

I have fixed the tabs and spacing, as well as added comments on the sed commands.

Running [pdf|xe|lua]latex on *.tex that has \usepackage{biblatex} with backend=biber produces a *.bcf file. Maybe you could look for that file to automatically decide to use biber.

If backend=bibtex, then no *.bcf file is produced and normal bibtex toolchain is needed.

[shiblon]

Hmm, that's an interesting idea, looking for the .bcf file. I believe, but would need to do some research to verify this, that you can specify multiple rules for a single target in such a way that any of them would satisfy it. The double-colon rule is not quite what I'm thinking of, but it might be made to work in this way. If you're aware of anything that works that way, that would be helpful. Meanwhile, I'll give it some more thought.

As a general rule, it is not all that easy to make dependencies based on files that will be created, since the dependency tree is a static thing in make (with the exception of pulling in generated .d files and causing make to run again as a result of their creation, which is another mechanism we can probably use for this).

[AdamGagorik]

Other ideas that come to mind:

• attempt to run biber *.bcf and bibtex *.aux no matter what, allowing one of them to fail silently
• use the same mechanism that decides if bibtex needs to run (if there is one?)

[victoredwardocallaghan]

Any news on this?

[shiblon]

Sorry to be slow to respond. I have not made any progress on this issue (work and life and death and difficulty intervened), but I'm back into it now.

Which means that I'll be quicker to review things. I still don't know how to solve this particular problem, and would be thrilled if someone proposed something that can automatically work.

[rriemann]

Any progress since then?

[shiblon]

I haven't had any promising leads on this, no. Since leaving academia, I only use LaTeX sporadically, so it's often hard for me to get my brain back into the game. :-)